Monthly Archives: December 2011

Over the last week or so, there has been a lot of news coverage of Barack Obama’s comeback in the polls. I noted his modest bounce here, and Scott Rasmussen wrote us to say that he thought Obama’s rise was due to increasing optimism about the economy. After all that hype, it appears that the Obama boomlet may have been overrated. In the Gallup Poll, Obama has dropped back to »

We criticized Israel’s decision to release more than 1,000 Palestinians terrorists and criminals in exchange for the kidnapped Gilad Schalit. It was, of course, a wrenching decision, and we are sympathetic to the officials who had to make it. But we (and many others) predicted that the inevitable consequence would be to encourage more such terrorist kidnappings. Sure enough: [A] senior IDF commander said on Wednesday that motivation to kidnap »

My endorsement of Mitt Romney got the predictable response. Many of our readers and others around the internet agreed with me; others denounced me as a hopeless moderate. To which I say, I am in good company–that notorious squish Ann Coulter has also endorsed Romney, on the ground that he is one of only two GOP candidates who is solid on illegal immigration (along with Michele Bachmann), and the one »

As I have observed previously, the three of us contributing to this site seem to me to reflect the division among conservative Republican voters trying to find the strongest candidate to take on Barack Obama. We are in search of the rightwardmost viable candidate. We are united by our desire to overcome Obama. But how to do it? The answer is not obvious, at least to me, even after reading »

A friend in Texas (where else) sent me the following item, which appeared in the New York Daily News on November 4, 1949, and since it has a Minnesota connection, as well as reminding us that some things about liberals never change, I thought it worth sharing with Power Line’s home town readers: I added this one on my own: »

We recently noted the search of a used car dealership in Tulsa as the result of a lawsuit alleging that it received about $20.2 million from Hezbollah members or Hezbollah-controlled entities to purchase and ship used cars. Now Glenn Reynolds notes that a Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, car dealership has been shut down on suspicion of ties to Hezbollah in the same scheme. The scheme involves a nationwide network of auto »

It is time for Republicans to get serious. After flirting with just about every candidate in a large presidential field, is is time to come home to the one candidate who has the demonstrated ability to run the largest organization in the United States, the Executive Branch of the federal government; who has never been touched by the slightest taint of scandal; whose success in the private sector makes him »

Nebraska’s Ben Nelson announced today that he will not seek re-election next November, despite the pleas of Harry Reid and other Democrats. Presumably Nelson chose to retire in response to polls that convinced him he faced an uphill battle. One of the sources of Nelson’s unpopularity in Nebraska was his vote for Obamacare. So this is an opportune moment to recall the Cornhusker Kickback, one of a number of acts »

The latest from Barncat Jones is called “Oh, Oh, Obama!” At a moment when many Republicans seem to be losing the forest (beating Obama) in the trees (Gingrich, Paul, Santorum, et al.), it is good to take a moment to focus on the awful failure that the Obama administration has been: »

One of my daughters works at a department store at the Mall of America. After the riot was over, she texted one of her sisters: [My department store] closed its doors. It was the scariest thing I have ever seen. Hundreds of gang members running through the Mall knocking things over. And there were fights all over! A good half of them were wearing red. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported: »

Reader Mike Leonovich describes himself as a local Albany-area capitalist. Mike writes with an update on the aftermath of the Albany Occupation: Thought you might be interested in the latest Occupy developments here in Albany, New York. First, this past Thursday, the City evicted the Occupiers from Academy Park, with police and sanitation workers descending on the encampment (after the permit expired, a deadline long announced). So, to elevate their »

The Star Tribune, which fancies itself the newspaper of the Twin Cities, recently published a column by one Ahmed Tharwat in which Tharwat instructed readers to “Stop fearing the Muslim Brotherhood.” Why? Because Tharwat is tired of responding to questions about it, and because they are his brothers. Alluding to the classic Blue Öyster Cult song that is generally understood to be an invitation to suicide, I wrote briefly about »

One of my holiday projects is to finish my rereading of the complete corpus of Whittaker Chambers (with a retrospective essay on his overlooked theological interests to follow eventually), and a couple days ago I read through an article Chambers wrote for The American Mercury in 1944 about the rise of Italian fascism. Somehow this paragraph reminded me of someone . . . familiar (“let’s see, start’s with ‘O’ I »

In his Impromptus column today, NR’s Jay Nordlinger brings the news made by the foreign minister of Zambia earlier this month: George W. Bush was making a visit to Zambia and some other African countries. He has a great many fans in Africa — maybe more than he does here in the U.S. Amnesty International is not a fan. They consider him a war criminal. They want him arrested. Last »

I started writing for The Dartmouth daily newspaper as a reviewer in the fall term of my freshman year in 1969 and continued to write for the paper until I graduated. I reviewed plays, books, and films. Writing for the paper, I also interviewed campus visitors such as the literary critic Alfred Kazin, the sculptor Elbert Weinberg, and the one and only William F. Buckley, Jr., all now deceased. As »

It is now generally forgotten that one of the tangential threads that contributed to the Watergate scandal was the Nixon Administration’s intervention on milk prices and their favoritism toward ITT in an antitrust matter. With that in mind the story in today’s Washington Post on the Obama Administration’s politicization of energy policy ought to elevate the Solyndra syndrome (since it was not an isolated matter) into a full-blown political scandal. »

This morning, I wrote about my family’s enjoyment of the Christmas holiday. Unfortunately, in many parts of the world, Christians cannot celebrate Christmas safely. In Nigeria, Islamic terrorists bombed three churches on Christmas day, killing at least 40 worshippers. But that was only the latest of many outrages. Persecution of Christians has reached new heights this year. At the Middle East Forum, Raymond Ibrahim sums up acts of anti-Christian persecution »